We're doing a fresh install of 1.5, (very recent, if not latest, nightly), and have run into some problems.
1) Nothing is getting saved to the configuration.php file. Not such a big deal, we can get past this by simply writing the configuration.php manually.

2) This is the big problem. The Admin password is not getting saved to the database by the installer. This results in an install that nobody can use. So, we're looking for a solution. Any ideas?

The best we can tell, all tables are being created and I think some data is being inserted. We get an empty Joomla site when we look at our domain, and there is a menu item "home" which leads me to believe that something is being inserted. However jos_users is empty.

The install appears to complete however since there's no admin user we can't do anything with it.

We haven't been using the FTP layer, we'll try to re-install with it enabled and see if that works.

If we do end up needing to insert the admin user manually is anything stored hashed or can we just put the username & pass into the DB in plain text?

It'll be a few hours before we're able to try the install again so if there's anything else you can think of that would be great.

I can't confirm this problem. Running through the install with the root directory chmod'd to 555 and no FTP layer ( so that the installer will display the configuration file ), an admin user is created. After pasting the information into configuration.php, I can also log into the admin application using the admin account.